]]>Disrupt (v) – to prevent something from continuing as usual or as expected.

– Cambridge Dictionary

The Innovator’s Dilemma

In 1997, Clay Christensen published the now infamous The Innovator’s Dilemma. In it, he coined the term “disruptive innovation”* to explain why successful companies fail even when they’re doing everything right.

In the book, he shows that incumbent firms have the advantage over newcomers with sustaining innovation. This makes sense. Incumbents are the leaders in their product and, thus, the ones who know it best.

However, it’s actually newcomers that win at disruptive innovation because they’re not held back by all the baggage of having an existing product, shareholders, and customers to please. They’re free to do something completely new without huge expectations right off the bat, so they have some time and space to play around and get it right in a small market before full-on disrupting the incumbents.

And there, explained Christensen, lies the innovator’s dilemma. In order to survive, incumbents have to support their existing successful product while also employing disruptive innovations that make their business obsolete.

I don’t think that word means what you think it means

In 2015, eighteen years after it’s publication, Christensen wrote a piece for Harvard Business Review entitled “What is Disruptive Innovation?” in which he essentially says “I don’t think that word means what you think it means” and admonishes us all to stop calling EVERYTHING disruptive. Disrupt this. Disrupt that. If you’ve been to a TechCrunch Disrupt, you’ll sympathize. Just because you’re a startup doesn’t mean you’re disrupting anything. Christensen argued that calling every innovation “disruptive” kills the benefits of having a disruption theory.

In particular, Christensen points to Uber as an example of what everyone keeps calling disruptive. What everyone, in fact, seems to hold up as the gold standard for what is meant by “disruption.” And yet, Uber is NOT actually disruptive according to the “true” definition of the term.

And by “true,” of course, Christensen is referring to the definition that he created for the word.

What it takes and Why Uber doesn’t have it

Per Christensen’s definition, in order to be disruptive, you must fall into one of the following two categories:

1. Low-End Disruption – a product that disrupts by providing a lower priced alternative than existing products. Low-end disruptions serve lower paying customers that incumbents don’t care about, which allows these disrupters to get a foothold below the incumbent’s radar and then *BOOM* before they know it, expand up to the higher end market and take away all the incumbent’s customers.

2. New Market Disruption – a product that disrupts by creating an entirely new market that isn’t being served by the existing products. This allows it to get a foothold without catching the attention of the incumbents because — again — it’s serving a set of customers that aren’t on the incumbents’ radar.

Christensen’s point was that since Uber does not meet either of these criteria (a point I would actually argue against, but to follow his logic…), they’re not disruptive.

Similarly, the companies that we tend to most often associate with disruption — like Google and Tesla — are, per Christensen, not disruptive either.

While I can sympathize with the frustration of having people incorrectly apply your theory to situations it wasn’t intended for, I have to question the act of telling people to stop using a word in the way that it’s defined by the English language.

disrupt verb /dɪsˈrʌpt/
​to prevent something, esp. a system, process, or event, from continuing as usual or as expected:

A heavy fall of snow disrupted traffic during the rush hour.

disruption noun /dɪsˈrʌp·ʃən/

Strikes threaten more disruptions for the tourist industry.

– Cambridge Dictionary

I don’t think anyone would argue against Uber’s complete disruption (in the true definition of the word) of the taxi industry. Or that companies like Google and Tesla are forcing competitors to change how they operate. The so-called “internet companies” are exactly preventing their competitors from “continuing as usual.” Either because the companies change themselves in order to stay competitive, or — by failing to stay competitive — they cease to continue at all.

Disrupting the theory

Christensen’s point is that traditional methods don’t apply when facing disruptive competition. That, in fact, following traditional “tried and true” techniques will actually lead a company to failure in the face of disruption.

I not only agree with this point, I believe it’s even more true today than it was when he wrote it twenty years ago. Technology and globalization and the gig economy and so many other factors have made it easier than ever for new players to enter existing markets. When a bookstore can enter the healthcare industry, a search engine the auto industry, and a tiny little startup can upend a 100+ year old industry, doing things “how we’ve always done them” becomes a less and less likely formula for success.

So maybe rather than critiquing people over terminology, it’s time to expand our theory of disruption to cover the real ways that companies are being made obsolete. And, in doing so, help the new and the established players to push the edge on what is possible.

—

*. In the book, he initially called it “disruptive technology,” but later updated it to “disruptive innovation.”>/span>

]]>https://hackerchick.com/disruptive-innovation-maybe-its-time-to-expand-our-theory/feed/0https://hackerchick.com/disruptive-innovation-maybe-its-time-to-expand-our-theory/Towards a Self-Healing Organizationhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackerChickBlog/~3/W_uXLH0XFp0/
https://hackerchick.com/towards-a-self-healing-organization/#respondTue, 11 Dec 2018 00:35:54 +0000https://hackerchick.com/?p=6735What would happen if we stopped trying to make our organizations flawless and instead made them indestructible?

]]>“Failures are a natural byproduct of venturing into the unknown.” – Stephen P. Robbins

In 1923 when Babe Ruth broke the record for most home runs in a single season, he also led the league in the highest number of strike outs. Thing is, nobody cares about the latter. He’s remembered for his successes, not the failures he incurred on his way there.

There’s been a trend in technology to stop treating failures as critical, emergency exceptions to be avoided at all costs, and to start treating them as a natural and expected part of operations.

While the approach feels backwards — perhaps even unethical to be releasing products that can fail to customers — it’s had a hugely positive impact on the technology available to us. It is, for example, a key principle behind how Cloud technology works. And the way today’s top internet apps are built.

It turns out that designing systems to automatically detect and handle failures is significantly less expensive then going to extraordinary lengths to try to prevent any errors from happening in the first place. It means the time that would have been spent in prevention can now be spent creating more value. It means happier, more productive employees who can spend their time creating new features instead of fire fighting problems in old ones.

And the result, gloriously, is a vastly improved experience as customers are rarely exposed to issues in a system that’s able to automatically and seamlessly handle them “under the hood” without their notice.

I see a parallel in how our organizations handle “failures” in everything going according to plan. We spend more energy ensuring that we’re on track with plans then we do monitoring our environment for changes.

We run our organizations with the assumption that everything will go as expected. That our plans will work out as anticipated. We’ll deliver what we planned to deliver. Sell what we planned to sell. That our markets, customers, partners, competitors, employees will continue operating as we expect.

We deliver our new product, three years in the making… and nobody wants it because the world has changed while we were busy creating it.

We develop an update for our existing product, but it doesn’t match changing customer expectations and we lose market share.

A competitor comes out with a new version of their product and suddenly our customers are demanding equivalent features that we hadn’t even considered.

A company from a different industry blindsides us by entering our market with a product that effectively renders ours obsolete.

New players create a tighter market for talent causing us to lose key employees and miss our profit estimates due to salary and benefit increases to bring our other employees up to the new industry norms.

Companies in our supply chain go out of business or raise their prices. Financial, societal, and political shifts change our customer’s priorities, needs, and interests… The assumption that all will go according to plan makes as much sense as assuming that technology will never fail.

What would our organizations look like if we flipped this mindset on it’s head? If we designed our organizations with the understanding that change and unexpected occurrences were the norm, rather than the exception? And, with this understanding, engineered them to be self-healing rather than flawless.

]]>https://hackerchick.com/towards-a-self-healing-organization/feed/0https://hackerchick.com/towards-a-self-healing-organization/F*ck what other people want. What do YOU want?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackerChickBlog/~3/z-x9yT9nIuo/
https://hackerchick.com/f-other-people-what-do-you-want/#commentsMon, 08 Jan 2018 13:59:28 +0000https://hackerchick.com/?p=3374I have a confession to make. There's something that's never quite resonated with me about Lean Startup.

Which, I get… if you don’t have a market, you’ve got nothing. And if you don’t understand that market’s burning desire, they’re never going to give up their hard earned cash for a never-before-heard-of product by a completely-unknown company. And… again, nothing.

But what about what YOU want?

Isn’t that the joy of entrepreneurship? That you can say f*ck what everyone else wants to do/say/be/have. THIS is what I want to do.

Isn’t that the burning passion that you need to keep yourself going through the 25 hour work days? Through staying true to your vision despite all the naysayers. Because, let’s face it, if you don’t have any naysayers – then you’re not being very innovative.

In fact, let’s examine that thought right there for a moment. If the “right” way to do a startup is to look to other people… but the only way to innovate, by definition, is to come up with something that no one else has ever thought of before. Well… how exactly does that work?

“What fun is it building something that nobody wants?”

This is a quote from Lean Startup’s creator, Eric Ries, that I’ve used myself in numerous lean startup presentations where I warn developers against the dangers of creating things with an if-you-build-it-they-will-come mindset.

And… okay, let’s just lay it all on the table.

Despite having said that line many times.

To rooms full of hundreds of people.

I actually think it’s really fun.

I mean, maybe it’s not fun because nobody wants it. But it’s just freakin fun to build shit that you want to build.

There. I said it.

This ain’t no field of dreams, honey

Okay, so what about all the startups – you know, the 9 out of 10 startups (that I also dutifully include a slide for in every one of my lean startup presentations) – that failed because they weren’t able to build something that others wanted.

Okay, well. First I want to make a distinction.

Innovation != Startup

For all you non-devs in the room, this means that innovation and startup are not the same thing (people keep telling me that normal people can’t read code, so I’m trying to do better at using my words – you’ll have to tell me if it’s working).

As devs/techies/hackers/engineers, a lot of us love the thrill of making shit that’s never been made before. And THAT is the very definition of innovation.

A startup, by contrast, is defined as “a newly established business” – one that’s built to scale very quickly. I suppose, if you want to get technical about it, a startup doesn’t even have to be innovative.

But if you build it they won’t come… or will they?

Here’s what Phil Libin, Co-Founder of Evernote, thinks about that in this video titled (spoiler alert) Build Something For Yourself:

“If you were starting a business even 5 years ago [ed: said in 2013],it would have been stupid advice to say build it for yourself. If you’re starting it now, it’s stupid advice to do anything else.

If you build something for yourself, if you build something that you love, that you think is sufficiently epic, there’s probably another billion people in the world that love it as well. Unless you’re like a spectacular weirdo. But, even if you are several standard deviations away from the center of the bell curve on weirdness, there’s still probably 10 million people that love something just as weird as you.

… if you’re making it for yourself, if you’re making something great, you’re at a huge advantage over somebody who’s making something for somebody else, because you can at least tell when it’s something great. You know. You’re making it for yourself. You can be an honest critic and an honest judge of your own products. And if you’re not doing that, it’s just much harder.”

—

The video then confusingly cuts, without any explanation, over to other successful startup founders talking about why they created their startups for themselves.

For the record, I wouldn’t have picked Ben Silbermann for this since his target market is, like, soccermoms– a fact he really struggled with getting Pinterest off the ground precisely because it wasn’t twenty-something-male-techies like himself. But, I digress.

Several standard deviations of weird

Who I would have used is Drew Houston from Dropbox.

When Dropbox came out, I was So. Freaking. Excited. about it. I’d try my best to explain to others why it was the most amazing thing ever, but I couldn’t ever seem to get anyone else as excited as I was about it.

And now I understand why.

Drew Houston created Dropbox because he kept finding himself with the problem of needing files on one computer, but realizing they were on another, different computer. A problem I struggled with a lot. So when Dropbox came out suddenly it was like my entire life got easier. My less-techie friends would be like “no, it’s cool, I’ve already got backups.”

What?!

I don’t know, maybe normal people only have one computer??

When it came out, I think I had 40 computers in my house at the time. And, ok, perhaps that’s several standard deviations from the average number of computers that people have. But! Here’s the thing. It wasn’t just me and Drew. When he posted his idea to Hacker news, he got 75,000 signups. Overnight!

Now, 10 years later, Dropbox has 500 Million users.

Weirdos indeed.

Do what you want to do

Even if you’re not convinced – I still think you should do what you want to do. Because… it’s what you want to do!

Life is too short to waste it trying to make other people happy.

Fuck that. Go read some Ayn Rand and get selfish (I know I’m going to get some haters for that but boo on you! I love Ayn Rand. And, uh, talk about several standard deviations of weird).

Rand’s philosophy is that the only way we will really do great work and create great things is if we’re doing what we want to do. And therefore, the only way to have wonderful things in this world is for us all to be selfish and do what we want.

Not what we think others want.

Now go build something that you don’t give a damn if anyone else wants.

]]>https://hackerchick.com/f-other-people-what-do-you-want/feed/2https://hackerchick.com/f-other-people-what-do-you-want/Evolution is the ultimate hackerhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackerChickBlog/~3/Ax06kIqhJ6M/
https://hackerchick.com/evolution-ultimate-hacker/#respondTue, 02 Jan 2018 22:43:53 +0000https://hackerchick.com/?p=2296If you’re interested in pushing the edge on what’s possible then you should look to evolution as a role model, because evolution is the ultimate hacker.

]]>I think if you’re interested in pushing the edge on what’s possible. If you’re thinking about changing the world. Then you should look to evolution as a role model,

because evolution is the ultimate hacker.

Where good ideas come from

There’s this amazing book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. And in it, author Steven Johnson talks about these parallels between innovation that occurs in nature – like how we evolved and or how our planet evolved, and innovation that’s human made –- like the lightbulb and the steam engine.

In the book, Steven Johnson talks about this pattern we see when we study innovation, which he calls the adjacent possible. This is the notion that, at any point in time, there’s a set amount of what’s possible in this world. Things that can be done with the technology and resources and knowledge that we possess today.

Therefore, all successful innovation is going to happen at the adjacent possible. Meaning, just BEYOND what’s possible today.

(try to go too far out and you get Charles Babbage inventing the computer in the early 1800’s. Which is fucking brilliant. Only, we didn’t have the pieces – literally – available to us at that time to actually make his invention real)

In nature, evolution is the embodiment of the adjacent possible. As Johnson says,

“Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer.”

(I think that might be one of my favorite quotes ever).

Evolution as tinkerer

Evolution doesn’t wake up one day and say, “I want birds to be able to fly, so here’s my detailed step-by-step plan for how we’re going to take to get there.”

Stayin alive, stayin alive (ah-ah-ah-ahhhhhhh….)

In dinosaurs, their wrist bones evolved in a certain way because it gave them more flexibility. The dinosaurs that were more flexible were able to survive by getting away from their enemies.

The ones who weren’t flexible… got eaten.

These flexible wrist bones in turn evolved over time into what now constitutes the wings of a bird. And along the way feathers evolved in birds for temperature regulation.

It wasn’t like evolution said, “HEY, I want to create wings so that birds can fly.”

It was more like evolution stumbled into the fact that, one day, it had all of the pieces to allow for flight. And so therefore, flight became possible.

And the realm of what was possible expanded a little.

Playing god

Johnson’s premise for the book is that man-made innovations follow the same patterns as those innovations that occur in nature (aka from evolution).

And, sure enough, when we really look into the history of some of the greatest man made inventions we see this same pattern of the adjacent possible – and things evolving little by little, not in leaps and bounds.

When we look at the 50 years leading up to the invention of the telephone, for example, we can see a series of discoveries and innovations. Each one building upon one another until suddenly, one day, Alexander Graham Bell had all of the pieces in place to allow him to create the telephone.

]]>https://hackerchick.com/evolution-ultimate-hacker/feed/0https://hackerchick.com/evolution-ultimate-hacker/Advice to a 14yo on Being a Girl in Techhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackerChickBlog/~3/CDP8q6dPTvM/
https://hackerchick.com/guidance-to-a-14-year-old/#commentsMon, 01 Jan 2018 14:13:57 +0000https://hackerchick.com/?p=3472From Ask Me Anything -- What would you tell 14 year old Abby about being a girl/future woman working in Tech?

Never tell a 14 year old girl what to do

Okay, so first off. My 14 year old self was not going to be a programmer.

My Dad taught me to code when I was 8 on our Atari 800 (48K RAM!).

It was fun. I’d write little games. When I got to programming class in High School (okay, side rant – this was in the 80’s people – HTF did they teach programming in the 80s in grade school but not today?!), my teacher literally called up my parents to tell them that I had to go into programming because I was so good at it.

I was an independent woman. I was going to do my own thing. I was going to be a huge fabulous success. I was going to be…

a manager.

Seriously, if you picked all of the possible occupations that I could have, I’m not sure that you could pick one I’m less suited to.

The list

When I was 14 the real world was completely incomprehensible to me. I had no idea what I should be aiming or hoping for. I’d just latch on to what I heard other people say. I think I had a list:

Be rich – I needed $1 Million because, duh, that was the gateway into “rich”

Be successful – I needed to be a manager, because if you were successful, then they made you a manager

I don’t know but I’m sure it had something to do with boys. Cuz, 14.

again, something with boys

most definitely more things having to do with boys

Honestly, the only thing I knew that I wanted when I was 14 were boys. Very cute boys.

Suspending disbelief…

Okay, but for the purposes of this post, we’re going to suspend disbelief and just pretend that my 14 year old self would have listened to a single word that came out of the mouth of an adult. I mean, adults are so dumb. I thought Logan’s Run was actually a pretty good idea.

There is excitement in the unknown

Your life has not been defined for you. There’s not some black & white version where you’re either rich and successful or you’re a failure. You don’t have to be a manager to be successful. You don’t have to be rich to be happy. You don’t have to know what you want right now, and even if you do know what you want right at this moment, it’s okay for that thing to change over time.

In fact, it’s actually like totally awesome to just follow your curiosity and let life unfold before you rather than having some specific set things that you have to reach (manager – check, $1M – check…) like a robot.

AND. Bonus. Following your curiosity rather than the “path you’re supposed to take” will very likely piss off the adults and the boring, normal people. Whereas, becoming the stereotype of success pretty much guarantees you’ll become one of those boring, normal adults. Like, gag me with a metrobus.

Being the only girl in the room… can be badass

I know everybody is all “oh, there’s not enough girls in programming” and I’m definitely going to piss some people off with this. But, let me be clear. Being the only girl in a very male field was never a deterrent to me getting into the field.

In fact, it was a bonus.

It was really important for me to be my own person. And… that I was. In 15 years of programming jobs, there was never a single other female developer on any of the projects I worked on. Sure, there were other women – as managers or designers or testers. But never another female coder.

I felt like a total bad ass.

I definitely had to adapt. But that’s not a bad thing. I learned very early on that people wouldn’t consider me a real programmer if I didn’t prove myself. I actually had a boss who would not talk directly to me (I kid you not) because I was literally the only girl on the entire floor who wasn’t a secretary and I guess little twenty-year old me fresh out of college was a threat to his manlihood. Or, something. I don’t know.

And I’d get the occasional “you’re a programmer? funny, you don’t look like a programmer” comment. Yeah, go ahead, you can be indignant. Personally, I loved it.

I wasn’t going to fit into anyone’s mold of what could or couldn’t be and if you were so ignorant as to have such a narrow world view then I was thrilled to put a crack in it.

But, it also became clear that I better be the best damn programmer in the room if I was going to be taken seriously. If I was standing around with a bunch of devs (obviously all guys) then unless I could keep up with every one of them, it would pretty much be assumed that I was in one of those other roles. I made it a point to make sure I had the biggest geek cred in the room from what I knew and what I was working on.

I made sure that I worked on the hardest, most bad ass projects that I could find. Which ended up being really cool because it got me building bleeding edge tech for a bunch of startups. Building things that nobody else had been able to figure out how to do before. And I loved it. I still love that!

Model your heroes, but ultimately be YOU

The downside to all of this was that I was forever trying to live up to some standard of what I thought other people thought was bad ass.

I think maybe… maybe that’s not a terrible thing when you’re just starting off your career. People keep telling students to “follow your passion.” What passion? When I was a teenager my passion was kissing cute boys. I don’t think that would have led anywhere good.

My senior year of college I became fascinated with Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. With these programmers who were able to build things nobody had ever built before. I started hanging out with really hard-core programmers and thought they were So. Cool. And as I got further in my career, I got super inspired by people who were figuring out how we could develop software better – people like Jim McCarthy and Bob Martin and – OH MY GOD (screaming fan!!) – Kathy Sierra (shhh! she’s another grrrl who codes).

I think everyone should have heroes. They inspire us to be more than we are today, to do more than we even realized was possible. And I think they help us to figure out what we are passionate about and what we’re so excited jump-out-of-bed-first-thing-in-the-morning to work on.

But, I think what we have to realize is that we also bring beauty and knowledge and greatness to what we do. And until we allow ourselves to be our own version of what we love, then we’re never truly living for ourselves. And we’re never being all that we were put on this planet to be.

So find your heroes, be inspired by them, imitate them. But ultimately, find your own voice.

Have you ever wondered what makes some people natural entrepreneurs? Lemon aid stands at the age of 5, starting their own companies out of their dorm rooms, getting fired from every “real” job because they could never quite get the knack of working for others…

Saras D. Sarasvathy at the University of Virginia did some research into this question of what makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial and what she found was that entrepreneurs think differently than normal people.

When, er, “normal” people imagine what could be – or what they want to be, they employ what the researchers termed causal reasoning. That is, they figure out what they want to do, set it as an end goal, and come up with the step-by-step plan for how to get there.

Very straightforward. Very what we’re taught in school and what big companies put a lot of money into place to perfect the art of.

The art of tinkering

Entrepreneurs, however, don’t think like that at all. They use effectual reasoning. And in effectual reasoning, we don’t even start with a real end goal. (gasp)

Instead, entrepreneurs take a hard look at where they are TODAY – who they are, what they know, who they know… and they start to tinker (YaY!). They start exploring the possible things that can be created out of all of this.

And so entrepreneurs make progress by allowing their goals to EMERGE over time, rather than defining them up front.

(Not) planning for serendipity

Here’s the thing. If you define up front where you’re going – there’s not going to be innovation there, because you already know where you’re going.

And even if some interesting ideas come up along your way, you’ve got a path that you’re busy following. Success for you is reaching your end goal, and so it’s not in your interest to veer off and look at these others things.

Which could be fine.

They might not be anything. And you’ve got places to go.

But it doesn’t leave you open to things like serendipity.

Whereas the entrepreneur’s goal is NOT to get to a certain known place, or accomplish a known thing.

To the entrepreneur, success is learning, not execution.

And when your goal is learning, and allowing what you learn to guide you – well, you’re exactly open to serendipity. And to discovering things that are so far off the beaten path that nobody else would ever get there.

And that is where innovation comes from.

If you want to be entrepreneurial – stop making plans and start following your curiosity.

]]>https://hackerchick.com/makes-entrepreneurs-entrepreneurial/feed/2https://hackerchick.com/makes-entrepreneurs-entrepreneurial/30 Days of Getting Shit Donehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackerChickBlog/~3/nzbcEjEq0d8/
https://hackerchick.com/30-days-getting-shit-done/#respondThu, 21 Dec 2017 04:42:45 +0000https://hackerchick.com/?p=5477Screw New Years Resolutions. If you really want to get shit done in 2018, join us in the Tech Misfits Creativity Lab for 30 Days of Getting Shit Done. It’s free, it’s fun, you’ll get to do it alongside the elite tech misfits (remember that you are the average of the 5 people you spend […]

]]>Screw New Years Resolutions. If you really want to get shit done in 2018, join us in the Tech Misfits Creativity Lab for 30 Days of Getting Shit Done.

It’s free, it’s fun, you’ll get to do it alongside the elite tech misfits (remember that you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with), and it’s a great way to kick 2018 off as your year of badassery.

Here’s How it Works

Step 1: Pick one thing you REALLY want to do

Something that’s been calling to you. Something that’s new & cool & a little of out of your comfort zone. Something that other boring people would say “what? I don’t get it? why would you want to do that?” Cuz – you’re NOT boring. You’re a tech misfit.

Step 2. Commit to working on it Every Single Day

from January 1 – January 30. Some days you’ll be able to spend a bunch of time (awesome!) other days not so much – that’s cool too. You just need to do SOMETHING (2 minutes!) each day to keep the momentum going.

Step 3. Check in each day

Each day (starting Jan 1), find the Getting Shit Done Day post in Tech Misfits and use that to record what you did today and what you’ll do next.

Step 4. Sit back and feel AMAZING about how much you’ve accomplished

Screw stupid new years resolutions, you’ve actually Gotten Shit Done because you rock!

Demo Day!

For those of you who make it all the way to the end we’ll do a Demo Day to showcase the awesome that you did.

Are you in?

]]>https://hackerchick.com/30-days-getting-shit-done/feed/0https://hackerchick.com/30-days-getting-shit-done/The Era of Creativityhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackerChickBlog/~3/Oym5T8s06dQ/
https://hackerchick.com/the-era-of-creativity/#respondSun, 10 Sep 2017 19:40:01 +0000https://hackerchick.com/?p=3896Forget everything you think that you know. None of it works anymore.

]]>Forget everything you think that you know. None of it works anymore.

The cereal killers

WAH! I’m so sick of hearing people whining about how millennials are killing off napkins and golf and Tony the Tiger. Who gives a shit?

Millennials are killing everything off because nobody cares about the old, “traditional” ways of doing things. Maybe the rest of us have just been doing it that way for so long that we don’t stop to think about all the ways in which it no longer serves us.

But millennials have come of age in a world where anyone with a basement can disrupt an entire industry and turn it on it’s head into a better answer.

Uber and the taxi system.

Airbnb and hotels.

Amazon and brick & mortar stores.

Spotify and radio.

Yelp and the… I don’t even remember anymore.

What isn’t serving us anymore? That will be next on the list.

It doesn’t make any sense to millennials to put up with it. And it shouldn’t make any sense to the rest of us either.

The age of the machine people

There’s all this talk of AI taking over. But I think Elon Musk has it wrong.

Software may be eating the world, but underneath it all, it’s people (not skynet) who are taking control back from things that have been running on auto-pilot for way too long. We’re saying we’re fed up and we’re not going to take it anymore, and we’re doing something about it.

In the age of creativity, hackers rule the world

A hacker, in my definition, is a person who’s able to take a thing and twist it to make it do more than anyone ever believed was possible. When Galileo took a piece of curved glass and used it to look at the stars – no one had ever done that before. Before then, glass was just glass. And stars were just little dots of light in the sky.

But Galileo wasn’t satisfied with that. He wanted to see the stars up close. And so he found a way to take boring old glass and turn it into a telescope with which he could view the stars up close and personal.

Galileo, in other words, was a hacker.

I’ll never forget a trip I took to San Francisco during the height of the dotcom boom. As a geek, I was crazy excited to visit Cygnus (a bad ass tech company that was later bought by Red Hat). And was dutifully awed by their huge playroom complete with air hocky, foosball, and over-sized bean bag chairs.

But the best part of all was that painted, REALLY BIG on the wall, in bright happy colors, it said:

Hackers rule the world!

I believed it was true then. And I believe it is even more true today.

I believe that our world belongs to those of us who are creating new things and putting them out into the world. Things that disrupt the old, fix the old, compliment it, ignore it, embellish it, replace it – it doesn’t matter.

New things that move this world forward and allow us to create the world that we want to be living in.

Validate your existence

I love how artist Catia Chien describes the act of creation as the means by which we create our sense of belonging. The way that we etch out our place in this world and validate our existence within it.

I couldn’t agree more.

Catia says:

“I have long ago understood that [earning a paycheck] is not where the gold is. You know,

you will chase [money] forever, and then, at the end of your life, you think, what have I done?

The feeling of actually belonging, it’s self-created. Arriving at the process of creating something from the inside out, it’s really just a validation of existing. It matters that we add to the conversation, so it’s not just one voice that’s being told. It matters.”

How do YOU matter?

What are you creating to add your own voice to the conversation?

(or are you just roboticly going through the motions on auto-pilot?)

What are you spending your time on that’s making you feel ALIVE and worthy and allowing you to create your mark and contribute a piece of yourself back into the world?

]]>https://hackerchick.com/the-era-of-creativity/feed/0https://hackerchick.com/the-era-of-creativity/What motivates you to create?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackerChickBlog/~3/UAFIquVXIQw/
https://hackerchick.com/what-motivates-you-to-create/#respondThu, 10 Aug 2017 16:52:25 +0000https://hackerchick.com/?p=3775I've been asking developers what it is that motivates and excites them to write code in their spare time. The best answer I've gotten so far is from Brendan Kohler. To which, I exhibit zero surprise.

I’ve been asking developers what it is that motivates and excites them to write code in their spare time.

The best answer I’ve gotten so far is from Brendan Kohler. To which, I exhibit zero surprise. This is the guy who, upon meeting, his very first words to me were around how programming in python was like writing poetry.

(we have, of course, remained friends to this day)

“I’d say for me the motivation is the desire to create some perfect jewel; if not art, then artifact. Before code it was poetry, but the desire to create something executable overwhelms any other artistic impulses. I think what’s neat about code is the sheer breadth of possibilities: as with poetry, you can create something designed to move someone emotionally or challenge their way of thinking (like games), but in addition you can explore science, mathematics, and other realms.”

(mic drop)

I really can’t possibly add on to that.

But! It did get my brain going on the broader question of what motivates us to create whatever it is that excites us.

The secret to happiness

I started thinking about the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (highly highly highly recommended) and how author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research into happiness found that this state of “flow” is, well… The Secret to Happiness:

I think this is one of my favorite things about coding. I love the challenge of solving problems and making computers do just what we want them to and writing beautiful, elegant code. Coding never fails to put me into what Csikszentmihalyi describes as nothing less than a state of ecstasy…

A state which is motivated by something far more pure than money or power:

“I began to look at creative people — first artists and scientists… — trying to understand what made them feel that it was worth essentially spending their life doing things for which many of them didn’t expect either fame or fortune, but which made their life meaningful and worth doing.”

And, of course, what Csikszentmihalyi found was this state of flow:

“There’s this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.“

I love this.

Why we struggle to create even when we want to

I think Flow can also explain why sometimes, even though we really want to create, we can’t seem to get out of our own way.

We sit down to write or draw or paint or code and… nothing.

To really achieve that state of flow, we have to have the right level of challenge to match our skill level. And, I know for me, I love drawing and painting but I’m still such a beginner that every new piece can feel like a huge ordeal. And, not helped by my perfectionist nature (!), I can get so overwhelmed that I psych myself right out of creating at all.

It’s only when I’m able to find a way to break through and focus on a piece that is within my abilities that I can really get going. And then boy, look out! Because I won’t step away for hours and hours and hours. My house could be on fire and I probably wouldn’t even notice.

On creating more

Csikszentmihalyi says we need to have 10 years of experience with something before we can achieve true flow, but that isn’t my experience, is it yours?

I think if we can find a way to set the right level of challenge for our skill level (not so hard that we’re too overwhelmed to do anything, but not so easy that we’re bored) and – maybe this is the harder one – not set these expectations that our first ever paintings should match those hanging in a museum – then we can allow ourselves the joy and… ecstacy of creation.

]]>https://hackerchick.com/what-motivates-you-to-create/feed/0https://hackerchick.com/what-motivates-you-to-create/How to Work with Developers at Your Startup: A Guide for Non-Techieshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackerChickBlog/~3/MkTWfxYgbn0/
https://hackerchick.com/how-to-work-with-developers-at-your-startup-a-guide-for-non-techies/#respondTue, 08 Aug 2017 12:58:18 +0000https://hackerchick.com/?p=2217Got developers at your startup? Freaking out because you have no idea how to manage them… judge the quality of their work… coach them through the forever changing product that marks the life of a startup…? Here’s what you need to do. Not just one of these. All of them. I know. It’s a long list. But they […]

]]>Got developers at your startup? Freaking out because you have no idea how to manage them… judge the quality of their work… coach them through the forever changing product that marks the life of a startup…?

Here’s what you need to do.

Not just one of these.

All of them.

I know. It’s a long list. But they all go hand in hand. Stick with me and I think you’ll see…

Frequent (at least once/week) demos

Get your developers on weekly sprints. Every week have them demo the tasks they created for you and give them feedback to guide them in the right direction.

Be OK with the fact that they’ll sometimes interpret things differently then you what you meant – that’s typical because software is complex. That’s also why you can’t afford to lose more than a week to a dev going in the wrong direction. I know startups are crazy busy but prioritize the demos. Have a standard day/time each week and Stick To It.

If you’ve got a brand new developer or contractor, get demos even more frequently until you’re comfortable with their work.

Make sure every task is demonstrable through the user interface

Non-technical managers tend to get understandably nervous because they don’t understand the behind the scenes technical tasks and feel like they’re at the mercy of the developers.

But you shouldn’t be – this is your startup! Come up with a set of tasks for developers to work on, where every task is something you understand that can be demonstrated in the user interface (e.g., through using the app). This way you understand and control the tasks and can evaluate the quality of work being done through your weekly demos.

FOCUS! On immediate priorities

What happens a LOT at startups is that you’ve got a founder (typically CEO) who is, understandably excited about their startup and so has a never ending list of the wonderful things their products will do.

And it changes every week.

This is super unhelpful to developers who need to understand what to focus on TODAY, and who need to be able to bring one task to completion before shifting to the next or else nothing will ever get done and everyone will get frustrated and hate each other.

Work with the developers to get a feel on how long things take (don’t go crazy and get it down to the minute, just ballpark it) and then figure out which of those tasks you want them focusing over the next week or two. No more than that!!

Then have them work down the list in priority order – demoing what they did at the end of each week.

Small tasks, one (and only) one a time

To make this work, each task will have to be small enough to fit into weekly sprints (that means that features will be broken down into multiple tasks). So work with developers to break them down. Put each task on your Kanban board:

And then make SURE that that once a developer starts a task, they are able to COMPLETE it before you give them something new! Otherwise you’ll have 100 tasks outstanding, none of which are compete, and a TON of time is lost in returning to an older task, trying to remember what you were doing. And everyone will hate each other.

Yes, it’s sometimes annoying to wait, but since all tasks are one week or less, you never have to wait more than a week.

If things change so much that you no longer want that task, kill it completely – including having them revert their code! and then they can start on the next one.

Just in Time Code & Refactor

In order to move as fast as you need to, developers should only be coding out the bare minimum they need to make each task work. That’s good because it lets you be:

super agile (they don’t have any extra code that they’ll have to change when, inevitably, priorities change), and

super fast (they only code the bare minimum needed)

BUT – to make this work, you need to make sure that they (have!) take the time to refactor the code before adding each new feature. That means part of the work of each new task involves refactoring the code they’re about to touch before they implement the feature. Bonus if they have some automated tests to help make sure nothing breaks when they refactor.

If you don’t let them do this – always instead saying “we needed this yesterday! there’s no time to refactor! go faster!” then the code will get to be such a mess that it will be harder (and slower and more error prone) to add new features. And it will eventually get to a point where it’s pretty much impossible to change the code so you’ll have to throw it away and start again.

And everyone will hate each other.

The RIGHT level of quality for your current stage

THAT SAID.. sometimes it’s totally fine to have awful code that you’re just banging out as fast as you can.

A super early stage startup is likely throwing away their first version or three – where (even if they don’t want to admit it) the main purpose of those first versions is to figure out what works with the customer and/or from a technical perspective. And THEN you can build the right thing. And so it’s a waste of time to make the code great. Just figure out what works and then build THAT.

You just have to realize that this has serious limits and be ok with that!

Premature Optimization & Scaling – just say no

A lot of developers understandably take pride in their work and want to build out this perfect architecture that’s optimized and scalable and will handle any new features that you want to throw at it.

Thing is – if you only have two customers – please don’t waste time making your product scalable enough to handle thousands! When you get to the point where it doesn’t scale enough for your number of customers, that’s a great problem to have and you should be able to get money (revenue or funding) to let you now build it out to the level you need.

(help developers take pride in their work instead by showing off the awesome features they’ve built at the weekly demos – and showing them how much they’re helping the startup evolve)

Importance of Startup/Agile mindset in developers

You need to hire/outsource devs that are comfortable in startups or super agile environments and are willing to be fast and scrappy. But, in a smart way (not just banging out crappy code! because that code is just going to break again and again and you’ll never get anywhere).

More senior developers are going to have the technical skills to be better at this. BUT… a lot of times more senior developers are used to working in non-startup environments and so may not be willing to move so quickly. They’ll prioritize having that perfectly optimized, scalable architecture over features you need today and you won’t be able to move fast enough.

]]>https://hackerchick.com/how-to-work-with-developers-at-your-startup-a-guide-for-non-techies/feed/0https://hackerchick.com/how-to-work-with-developers-at-your-startup-a-guide-for-non-techies/What do you want to add to your life?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackerChickBlog/~3/m7ukdD2gCbE/
https://hackerchick.com/want-add-life/#respondSun, 06 Aug 2017 15:50:36 +0000https://hackerchick.com/?p=2309The next 30 days are going to pass whether you like it or not, how are you going to use them to improve your life?

I’m realizing I never gave proper cred to my 30 posts in 30 days challenge.

You have to watch this TED Talk by Matt Cutts – Try Something New For 30 Days.

Go ahead, I’ll wait. It’s only 3 1/2 minutes.

Matt says,

“Think about something you’ve always wanted to add to your life and try it for the next 30 days. It turns out 30 days is just about the right amount of time to add a new habit”

And. BONUS. He learned that by doing 30 days challenges, the months stopped flying by in a blur and instead starting becoming much more memorable. He did one challenge where he took a picture every day and he could look at those pictures and remember exactly where he was and what he was doing when he took it.

And what’s even cooler is I went to look up his twitter to thank him for it. He actually did this talk in 6 years ago. And the first thing I see in his twitter feed?

WHAT?!

6 years later and he’s still doing 30 day challenges.

That is amazing.

30 posts in 30 days

As soon as I watched this I immediately knew what my thing was that I wanted to add into my life.

I wanted to get back into writing.

And thus was born my 30 posts in 30 days challenge.
(psst, feel free to send me topic ideas under Ask Me Anything)

What is YOUR thing?

The next 30 days are going to pass whether you like it or not, how are you going to use them to improve your life?

]]>https://hackerchick.com/want-add-life/feed/0https://hackerchick.com/want-add-life/Embracing imperfectionhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackerChickBlog/~3/5cCXNU7ABEU/
https://hackerchick.com/embracing-imperfection/#respondSat, 05 Aug 2017 16:23:58 +0000https://hackerchick.com/?p=3626So if you’ve been following along, you know I’m in the middle of this 30 posts in 30 days challenge. Which, as a die-hard perfectionist who tends to blog more like 30 posts in 30 months…. well, is a challenge. My biggest challenge is allowing myself to put together a quick post to share my […]

]]>So if you’ve been following along, you know I’m in the middle of this 30 posts in 30 days challenge. Which, as a die-hard perfectionist who tends to blog more like 30 posts in 30 months…. well, is a challenge.

My biggest challenge is allowing myself to put together a quick post to share my thoughts, as opposed to spending 5–6 hours to fully flesh out every idea to the nth degree, complete with perfect accompanying art work, before posting it.

and a bit of irony…

My third-ever post on Hacker Chick was called More Pots Make Us Better. It tells the story of an art teacher who divided her pottery class into 2 groups…

For the first group, she told the students that their final exam was to make the best pot they possibly could and they’d be graded on its quality.

For the second group, she said that for their final exam they were to produce as many pots as they possibly could. Quality didn’t matter, their grade would be based solely on quantity.

So, the semester comes to an end and the teacher is grading the assignments and wouldn’t you know but the absolute best, most exquisite pots were created from that 2nd group — the ones who were told not to worry about quality.

You see, in creating so many pots, their skills improved at an alarming rate, they got better and better with each one — without even trying!

Clearly, ten-year-later-Abby is still struggling with this one. Clearly, I need to make more pots.

]]>https://hackerchick.com/embracing-imperfection/feed/0https://hackerchick.com/embracing-imperfection/Which do you want to be: perfect or innovative?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackerChickBlog/~3/n4GrAIN-qqM/
https://hackerchick.com/perfect-or-innovative/#respondThu, 03 Aug 2017 12:49:46 +0000https://hackerchick.com/?p=3591Do as I say, not as I do This is a quote I tweeted out last week with the comment A good reminder for us damn perfectionists: “It is easy to begin once you have accepted that what you produce may not be very good, and that’s normal.” — Megan Mcardle But, clearly. As I sit here at 5am […]

This is a quote I tweeted out last week with the commentA good reminder for us damn perfectionists:

“It is easy to begin once you have accepted that what you produce may not be very good, and that’s normal.” — Megan Mcardle

But, clearly. As I sit here at 5am because I’ve been up all night trying to put together a perfect blog post for my 30 posts in 30 days challenge. Well, clearly… I’m not remembering that at all.

A bit of back story…

Einstein and Newton and Neo, Oh My

I recently took the 16 Personalities Test and came out as an INTP, aka “The Logician.” That’s the same personality type as Einstein and Newton and Pascal and… wait for it. Neo.

(there is no spoon)

Too cool!

Right up until I read the description…

“The one thing that really holds INTPs back is their restless and pervasive fear of failure. INTP personalities are so prone to reassessing their own thoughts and theories, worrying that they’ve missed some critical piece of the puzzle, that they can stagnate, lost in an intangible world where their thoughts are never truly applied.”

Yikes!

Okay, yes, there are several pages describing INTP on 16 personalities.

But all I could see was “pervasive fear of failure.” And all I could think was, without failure, there is no innovation. Where does that leave me?

I kept thinking about all the times I do that: reassessing my own thoughts and spending forever hunting down that critical missing piece of the puzzle before allowing myself to move forward.

This endless searching for better, more complete, perfectly bullet-proof ways of doing things… it really gets in the way of Getting Shit Done.

Just put something out there!

I tell this to all of the startups I advise. But, again, do as I say, not as I do.

We don’t have to have the perfect answer. We just have to have a reasonably good guess that we can use as a stake in the ground from which to start.

To get our name out there, to kick off our project, to get involved in the space that we’re interested in, to share our idea. Whatever it is. We can’t get anywhere if we don’t ever allow ourselves to start.

And just because we start with something, that doesn’t lock us into it. Once we start, we can evolve what we did, continue to make it better if we choose. Or we can simply enjoy the fact that we put ourselves out there, shared a bit of our gift with the world, and feel proud of that before moving onto our next thing.

From imperfection comes learning

And, here’s the thing. If we can, as Mcardle suggests, truly embrace that what we put out there may not be very good. Well, then that leaves us open to so many new ideas and gifts of insight and learning.

Gifts and knowledge that we may have been closed off to if we decided that what we’d put out there was “perfect” or “complete.”

If we share something where we’re missing a crucial piece of the puzzle, then we open ourselves to the possibility of being enlightened by others who have different viewpoints and different knowledge to share. Things they might not have had an opportunity to share with us if we hadn’t allowed our imperfect creation to go out into the world.

]]>I’ve challenged myself to 30 posts in 30 days. So…. what do you want me to write about? Give me questions and each day for the month of August I’ll write a blog post on the most interesting question I’ve received to date.

Leave your question in the comments below or use the Ask Me Anything page. If you use the page, I’ll email you a reply even if your question doesn’t make a blog post.

And let me know if you’d like a shout out, ala

“This question comes from long time listener, first time caller Joe Shmoe. Thanks, Joe! Joe wants to know…”

]]>https://hackerchick.com/ask-me-anything/feed/0https://hackerchick.com/ask-me-anything/Waking Uphttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackerChickBlog/~3/I9FpjBHbEK4/
https://hackerchick.com/waking-up/#commentsSun, 30 Jul 2017 15:10:53 +0000https://hackerchick.com/?p=2277I've got this kick in the ass lately - I sold my home, decided to move back up north, change what I do for a living (yeah yeah, again). I cut my hair, I want to get a dog. Two, actually. And some furry chickens...

I’ve got this kick in the ass lately – I sold my home, decided to move back up north, change what I do for a living (yeah yeah, again). I cut my hair, I want to get a dog. Two, actually. And some furry chickens.

I feel like I can’t change enough fast enough. I feel like I’ve been stuck at the bottom of a dark hole of depression and apathy for the last couple years and I’m Just. DONE. With it. There is so much creativity and opportunity and possibility out there, I want to take advantage of it all. I don’t want to look back and say what the fuck was I waiting for?

Looney Tunes

Mental health is a really fucked up thing. It can make you question every emotion that you have. Which in turn can make you question every decision that you make. Is this really a good idea to go sell my home and move even further away from the city I love and do so much of my work in? Or is this a manic episode I’m going to wake up from homeless and alone and broke?

I don’t know. But at this point I’m more afraid of the opportunities I might miss then the failures I might encounter.